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Was AD&D1 designed for game balance?
- Thread starter Bullgrit
- Start date
Chess is all strategy. An opponent who (or that, as in a computer program) beats me every time might be as easily beaten by you because you have more skill.
Chutes and Ladders is all chance. The most cunning grownup gamer has no advantage over a little child.
Both of those are designed to produce different outcomes among participants, but on different bases.
Other amusements may be designed to produce essentially the same experience among all participants. Different people might have different guesses as to the end of a movie, but the succession of scenes is the same regardless.
How hard should it be for a player to get a character to high level (or even to 2nd level)? Should it even be in question, or just an entitlement? To what degree should it depend on player skill, and on what skills? To what degree should it depend on chance -- and how significant is the skill of not leaving things to chance?
Is variation in outcomes desirable at all, and if so then to what degree -- or is the design for an experience more like that of watching a movie, or even like telling a story?
Chutes and Ladders is all chance. The most cunning grownup gamer has no advantage over a little child.
Both of those are designed to produce different outcomes among participants, but on different bases.
Other amusements may be designed to produce essentially the same experience among all participants. Different people might have different guesses as to the end of a movie, but the succession of scenes is the same regardless.
How hard should it be for a player to get a character to high level (or even to 2nd level)? Should it even be in question, or just an entitlement? To what degree should it depend on player skill, and on what skills? To what degree should it depend on chance -- and how significant is the skill of not leaving things to chance?
Is variation in outcomes desirable at all, and if so then to what degree -- or is the design for an experience more like that of watching a movie, or even like telling a story?
howandwhy99
Adventurer
I voted yes, but otherwise agree with the above.
For whatever reason the hobby began to think of its' games as simulation games. Which isn't what roleplaying games are. In a simulation game balance is predetermined by the designer. Balance is achieved by pitting every player against the same challenges each with a pre-set difficulty to overcome. Like in computer games, RPG simulation games saw game balance as a level of difficulty predetermined by the designers. However, sometimes players are given the option to change this beforehand (easy, standard, hard, InSaNe!). In 3e and 4e this was/is set by the DM. If you beat a kobold while playing solo on a bought encounter map in either game, you faced the same difficulty as anyone else playing did in the exact same situation.
Early D&D did not require consistent challenges across games, but only within them. This was an asset in regards to their flexibility. AD&D was actually created to set a predetermined consistency of challenges and their difficulty across all games. As I understand it, this was originally done so convention tournament participants could all be working within the same skill set. That and the game was becoming so varied in its play that modules and other salable items were not applicable to many people's games. Now, in AD&D, each could recognize a monster for what it was from another game and all have an equal chance of beating it. But, ironically, this attempt at formalizing the game backfired and led to the simulation game mindset we've seen for a long, long time now.
It should be said though, neither is AD&D a storygame. Its' ideas of balance had more to do with equivalent rules for individual elements (like monsters, treasure, magic items, combat actions) across all games than in balancing the game according to what degree each player could contribute to a story-making session. It was (and is) still a strategy game where creating a story was not the objective, so giving every player equal story rights did not go into balancing its' design. Each player at the table does play turn by turn (or round by round depending on the situation), but a player's potential influence over what can happen in each turn is radically different for every PC.
AD&D1e and other early editions are balanced according to single players facing the game alone. Each and every game was a solo game against the impartial DM/Ref where additional players enabled the choice of whether or not to assist each other. Every player is rewarded separately and each are in a different situation than each other (regardless of what is going on). What makes the game balanced is every player is attempting to guess the same hidden ruleset behind the screen even though each player may need to achieve different ends within it to gain points. If they were the same Class (role), then the rewarded ends would be the same. But class levels between players, treasure distribution, influence of powers between PCs, the number and influence of allies between PCs, et cetera all have no bearing on the balancing of the game.
Keefe the Thief
Hero
What this thread shows is that there are broad, deep channels separating old-school and new-school concepts and approaches.
Somehow i have to wonder, though, if they are already there (and only identified and described in threads like this), or if some people are constantly shovelling them deeper and broader.
Raven Crowking
First Post
I think it is safe to ay that there are people constantly shovelling them deeper and broader. It's hard to "slaughter the sacred cows", or create a new edition that isn't backwards-compatable, without doing do.
RC
Bullgrit
Adventurer
I think this.Keefe the Thief said:
When people start arguing to break up a commonly understood term like "game balance" into different meanings for different eras. . .
It's like saying "aerodynamics" meant something different in the 1910s and 1940s than it does in the 2000s.
Bullgrit
I think the ubiquity of mutual misunderstanding and talking at cross purposes in 'game balance' threads shows it's not a commonly understood term at all. In the run-up to 3E, its designers started using it in a very specific and somewhat novel sense, without (at first) making that sense and its assumptions explicit, and people started to copy that use, leading to frequent confusion when they failed to distinguish the specialized 3E jargon sense of 'game balance' from its universe of possible meanings and ways of balancing games.
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Raven Crowking
First Post
Hrm. I wonder how one would define "game balance" so as to be inclusive of the attempted balances of both Mr. Gygax and WotC? When I see that definition, I will be happy to rethink my position.
In any event, if what you mean by "game balance" is not what Mr. Gygax meant by "game balance", then it isn't Mr. Gygax who changed the definition. Your criticism applies to the newer, not the older.
"Aerodynamics" implies the same goal in all eras; it also implies something that is objectively measurable. Neither is true of "game balance", not in any era. The only way every PC can be "balanced" is if every PC was mechanically the same. And, while we seem to be (officially) headed in that direction, we (thankfully) aren't there yet. Nor, I think, shall we ever be.
The gulf between NS and OS methods of approaching the game widens as a matter of "evolution", as it were -- similar to what happens when a species is seperated, diverging into two species. It is inevitable, especially if/when the creators of the new game intentionally sever ties with the past.
RC
